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"... Conditioned upon the parties' compliance with the terms and conditions of
this Agreement, the parties, and their respective officers, directors, agents, servants,
employees, parents, subsidiaries, affiliated companies, attorneys, successors and assigns,
hereby release each other from any and all claims, demands, damages, losses, liabilities,
rights or causes of action, including but not limited to any claim for attorneys fees,
arising out of or relating to the Action and/or the allegations asserted therein...."

Reading this please make your own conclusions about the inner structure of the underlying legal system (IMAGINE YOU WOULD STRUCTURE CODE THE SAME WAY!).

"... Conditioned upon the parties' compliance with the terms and conditions of this Agreement, the parties, and their respective officers, directors, agents, servants, employees, parents, subsidiaries, affiliated companies, attorneys, successors and assigns, hereby release each other from any and all claims, demands, damages, losses, liabilities, rights or causes of action, including but not limited to any claim for attorneys fees, arising out of or relating to the Action and/or the allegations asserted therein...."

Reading this please make your own conclusions about the inner structure of the underlying legal system (IMAGINE YOU WOULD STRUCTURE CODE THE SAME WAY!).

Reading this sort of legalese is actually quite simple: whenever you see an agglomeration of terms like that, read the first one, and mentally replace the rest of them with "or similar". It's actually quite similar to programming, since you need to explicity enumerate the cases. Neither computers nor lawyers are very good with fuzziness.

Sigh. Is that old "Bonhomie Snoutintroff [theregister.co.uk]" canard still kicking around? A story that gave as its warped reasoning for the idea that "EFF always loses" two cases that EFF didn't actually conduct (Eldred v. Ashcroft and Gilmore v. Gonzales), and one that we actually won: ("They defended two amateur online journos against Apple's ham-fisted effort to silence criticism, and got beat down severely: another bad precedent." - odd, that's not quite what the Appeals Court decided when the California state appeals court upheld our defence, and held that our clients were protected by California's reporter's shield law and the constitutional privilege against disclosure of confidential sources: http://www.eff.org/Censorship/Apple_v_Does/ [eff.org] ).

And as to the Snoutintroff claim we somehow "persuaded" Ed Felten to withdraw from a talk as a media stunt, it's worth reading what Felten himself had to say [freedom-to-tinker.com] about that period. Chilled speech, baseless legal threats, people losing jobs because they stand up for their right to reveal security flaws. That's what EFF fights.

It's worth spending time reading EFF's actual track record - either from our list of victories [eff.org], or from the Wikipedia list [wikipedia.org].

(Or hell, just read our press releases from the last week [eff.org] where we were filing an amicus brief to defend constitutional protection for stored email, began a case to investigate and correct some 18,000 missing votes in an apparent e-voting mess-up in a Florida seat that was won by less than 400 votes, and filing an FOIA request to uncover the details of EU passenger records being handed over to the US government. And that's what we did on a Thanksgiving week - with a staff of around 30, and a budget that's a fiftieth of the size of the ACLU, and a twentieth of what the MPAA spend on Washington lobbying alone. And consider becoming a member [eff.org] if you're impressed - you have no idea how much every extra membership helps, nor how much there is left to do.)

You mean, -1 Uninformed? Seriously, do you not even know what fair use is? Copyrights have limits, despite what copyright holders like to pretend. They are an artificial monopoly created to reward artists, not a God Given Right. Don't believe me? Here you go, the law itself [copyright.gov]. And before you get confused, parody is a form of "criticism" and "comment"--laws are always a bit vague because the world isn't black and white. Yes, there is also a limit to what is considered a parody, but parodies are legal. Determining if something is a parody is up to the courts.

Obviously, I am not a lawyer and you should not use this as legal advice. Otherwise, I would have smacked you down with much more wit and knowledge, that which is gained from more than five seconds on google.

Which is why I gave the Wikipedia list [wikipedia.org] too. It's pretty comprehensive; I'm sure there are omissions, but it should give you an idea of the ratio of successes -- something that the original piece didn't even attempt. If somebody wrote a piece claiming that it was obvious your uncle was a bad gambler, and included bets he hadn't made, and some he didn't lose, wouldn't you be suspicious of the conclusion?

The way EFF explained it to me (I'm Frankel or, as EFF and my mother call me, Dr. Frankel. Also my old school when they're asking for money), if Lyons (the Barney company) keeps sending around nastygrams, that will establish a pattern that courts will probably look on very unfavorably. And the $5000 may be a drop in the bucket to them (it goes to EFF, incidentally), but the negative publicity was priceless. EFF would love to represent any future recipients of Barney's nastygrams.